CHAPTER 16: ROLLO REESE MAY Flashcards
When was Rollo Reese May Born?
Rollo Reese May was born to Earl Tittle and Marie Boughton May in Ada, Ohio, on April 21, 1909. He was the first son, and the second child, in a family of six children.
What happened to May during his second year in Europe?
May began questioning the meaning in his life and finally had a nervous breakdown.
What did a Nervous Breakdown mean to May?
It meant that the rules, principles, valued by which he used to work and live by simple did not suffice anymore.
What is Healthy Religion?
Confidence in the universe, trust in God, belief in one’s fellow-men, or what not, the essence of religion is the belief that something matters– the presupposition that life has meaning.
Existentialism
Philosophy that studies the essence of human nature. The emphasis is on freedom, individuality, and phenomenological experience.
Dasein
To be there.
Indicates that the focus of interest for the existentialist is a particular person experiencing and interpreting the world at a particular time in a particular place.
Why is existence complex and a dynamic process?
By choosing, valuing, accepting, and rejecting, humans are constantly becoming something different than they were.
Becoming
Contention that through their active involvement with their life’s circumstances, authentic people are constantly changing.
Becoming
Contention that through their active involvement with their life’s circumstances, authentic people are constantly changing.
What are Three Modes of Existence
- Umwelt
- Mitwelt
- Eigenwelt
Umwelt
Physical, objective world. The world that is studied by the physical and biological sciences.
Mitwelt
World of human interactions.
Eigenwelt
The intrapersonal world. An individual’s self-awareness.
Alienation
A person’s estrangement from some aspect of his or her nature.
Alienation results in feelings of loneliness, emptiness, and despair.
Because there are three modes of existence, one can become alienated from nature (Umwelt), from other people (Mitwelt), or from oneself (Eigenwelt).
Freedom
Exists only as a potentiality, however, and can be underdeveloped in some people, or even denied.
How does one increase freedom?
By expanding consciousness.
It is through freedom of choice that the person can transcend his or her immediate circumstances, so no human needs to be a victim of environment, genetics, early experiences, or anything else.
Responsibility
Because we are free to choose our own existence, we are also entirely responsible for that existence. We can praise or blame no one but ourselves for whatever we become as people.
Ontology
The study of existence or what it means to be.
What is an Ontological Analysis?
Attempts to determine what all instances of each concept have in common.
Example of Ontology
Such an analysis seeks to determine the essential ingredients of the experience of love.
What two ontological questions are the existentialist concerned with?
- What is the essence of human nature, or what does it mean to be human?
- What does it mean to be a particular human, or what makes a person the way he or she is?
What is the existentialist interested in?
Discovering the essence of people in general and of particular individuals.
Phenomenology
Study of conscious experience as it exists for the person without any attempt to reduce, divide, or compartmentalize it in any way.
Authenticity
If people live their lives in accordance with values that are freely chosen, they re living authentic lives.
If, however, people conform to values established by others, they have not exercised their personal freedom and are therefore living inauthentic lives.
Inauthenticity
Casually related to neurotic anxiety and guilt and the feelings of loneliness, ineffectiveness, self-alienation, and despair.
Courage
An authentic life involves creating for oneself a structure of meaning that will guide one’s thoughts and actions.
Such a life requires courage because it means that often one’s beliefs and actions may be contrary to those that are widely accepted.
Death
Represents nothingness or nonbeing and is the polar opposite of the rich, full, creative life.
Represents the opposite of what most existentialist are urging people to come.
How to grasp the meaning of existence?
One needs to grasp the fact that he might not exist
How do you live an authentic life?
One must involve dealing with both literal and symbolic death and therefore, authenticity and anxiety are inseparable.
Thrownness
The facts that characterize a person’s existence over which he or she has no control.
Also called Facticity and Ground of Existence.
Example of Thrownness
Natural events such as earthquakes, volcanoes, and hurricanes; genetic factors, such as the colour of one’s skin, one’s gender, and the possession of exceptional talents (artistic, musical, or mathematical abilities and so forth.
Destiny
The givens in one’s life that are interpreted creatively and are thus provided meaning.
Example of Destiny
It is a given that all humans will die, but whether this fact is a source of vitality or despair is a personal choice.
Why is Determinism and Freedom closely related?
Every advance in freedom gives birth to new determinism, and every advance in determinism gives birth to a new freedom.
Human Dilemma
The fact that humans are capable of viewing themselves as both subject and object at the same time.
Object-Subject Dichotomy
Humans are capable of seeing themselves as an object to which things happen.
Example of Object-Subject Dichotomy
As people, we are influenced by the physical environment, the presence or absence of other people, genetics (we are tall, short, male, female, light-skinned, dark-skinned, etc), and by social or cultural variables.
We are influenced by our destiny.
Self-Relatedness
What distinguishes humans from the rest of nature.
It is “man’s capacity to stand outside himself, to know he is the subject as well as the object of experience, to see himself as the entity who is acting in the world of objects.”
Intentionality
The fact that mental events are directed towards objects outside themselves.
Example of Intentionality
Perception always involves the perception of something.
It is through intentionality that a relationship between objective and subjective reality is formed.
Will
The capacity to organize oneself so that movement in a certain direction or toward a certain goal may take place.
Wish
The imaginative playing with the possibility of some act or state occurring.
Anxiety
To be human is to experience anxiety.
Anxiety is the experience we have when our existence as an individual is threatened.
To ponder one’s inevitable death causes anxiety as does the threat to one’s values.
To grow, one’s vales must be threatened.
Anxiety is an unavoidable component of a normal, healthy life.
Normal Anxiety
Part of the growth process, and no attempt should ever be made to eliminate it from a person’s experience.
Neurotic Anxiety
Anxiety that results from not being able to deal adequately with normal anxiety.
Example of Neurotic Anxiety
If a person conforms or develops inflexible values to avoid normal anxiety, the normal anxiety is converted into neurotic anxiety, which causes the person to live life within narrow limits and inhibit various experiences that are necessary for healthy growth.
Shut off from many of his or her potentialities.
What does Ontological guilt arise from?
The fact that one can see themselves as one who can choose or fail to choose.
Normal guilt
Part of a healthy existence and can be used constructively.
Unavoidable.
Neurotic Guilt
If normal guilt is not recognized and dealt with constructively, it can overwhelm a person, causing him or her to block out the very experiences conductive to personal growth.
Values
Summarize in symbolic form those classes of experience we deem especially important.
What does a person’s value system determine?
How much meaning an experience will have, how much emotionality it elicits, and what is worth aspiring to in the future.
When can a person meet anxiety?
To the extent that their values are stronger than the threat.
Oedipus Conflict
A struggle between dependence and independence.
Example of Oedipus Conflict
Young children needs are food, shelter, and safety which are provided by their parents.
Young children have a tendency to continue to depend on their parents for the need of satisfaction.
However, as adults, we must give up on dependence (parents) and be independent (on ourselves) for the needs of food, shelter, and safety.
Commitment
One must exist in the world and therefore act on it.
Values are meaningless unless they are manifested in behaviour.
The formulation of values also commits people to a course of action.
Behavioural commitment to self-formulated, future-oriented, human values characterizes the authentic life.
Love
True or authentic love involves the harmonious blending of sex, eros, philip, and agapé.
What are the 4 types of love?
- Sex
- Eros
- Philia
- Agapé
Sex
One’s biological drive.
Satisfied by engaging in sexual intercourse just as eating a meal can satisfy the hunger drive.
Consisting of the building up of bodily tensions and their release.
Eros
The desire for union with another person.
Seek a tender, creative relationship within the context of sexual experience.
Seeks wholeness or interrelatedness among all of one’s experiences.
Does Eros need to be positively experienced?
No. Eros exemplifies daimonic forces within us.
Daimonic
Any natural function which ash the power tot ake over the whole person.
Example of Daimonic
Sex, rage, and the craving for power.
How can Daimonic be evil?
When it usurps the total personality without regard to the integration of that self, or to the unique forms and desires of others and their need for integration.
Where does the word Daimonic come from?
Greek work meaning both divine and diabolic.
Philia
Friendship or brotherly love.
Agapé
The concern for the other’s welfare beyond any gain that one can get out of it.
An unselfish giving of one’s self to another; a giving of one’s self without any concern of what one will get in return.
Psychotherapy
Effective psychotherapy can only result from an encounter between two humans.
The therapist must attempt to understand things as the client does and try to understand how the client is using a “problem” to maintain his or her identity as a person.
The goal of therapy is to free the client from neurotic anxiety and guilt, so that the person will be freer to actualize his or her potential.
Unconscious
Cognitive experiences that are denied awareness because a person is not living an authentic life.
Encounter
Describes the therapeutic process.
The meeting of two selves.
Seeing things as the other sees them and vice versa.
An honest sharing of one’s self with another person.
Why is Encounter a necessary component of successful psychotherapy?
The client must be understood as a total human being, not as a collection of test scores or repressed experiences or as an object that fits into some diagnostic category.
Myth
Archetypal patterns in human consciousness and therefore where there is consciousness, there will be myth.
Why do Myths reflect the core of human nature?
Individual myths will generally be a variation on some central theme of the classical myths.
What dimensions to Myth’s partake in?
It is of the earth in our day-to-day experiences and is a reaching beyond our mundane existence.
What are the four primary functions of Myths in our lives?
- They give us a sense of personal identity
- They give us a sense of community
- They support our moral values
- They allow use to deal with the mysteries of creation
New Science of Humans
Rather than a science of humans based on determinism and elementism and one that has as its goal the prediction and control of behaviour, May proposed a science of humans based on existential philosophy.
What does the New Science of Humans take into consideration?
The human use of symbols, the human sense of time, the importance of values, the uniqueness of each human, and the importance of freedom.
